Sharing my journey through life.

Last year I decided to move away from working with clients who only had one-off projects to clients who had monthly ongoing needs.

My thinking was that this was the best way to predictable monthly income. And that’s turned out to be true.

Right now I’m making 81% of my income from clients who I’m working with on a monthly basis. And I love it.

It has definitely not been an easy road though. Like I said, I made this decision last year and after a lot of trial and error I finally feel like I’m hitting my stride here.

It’s a good reminder that even though we usually don’t know how our goals will come to pass, it’s still important to set, and pursue, them.

OK… enough motivational talk. Let me tell you how I got these clients because that’s what you really want to know, right?

Two of my clients I got because I created an online course last year that taught insurance agents the A,B,C’s of digital marketing. They went through this course and then turned around and hired me to implement what I taught them.

We built custom websites for them (both were over $10,000) and then we started managing those websites for them on a monthly basis as well as doing PPC management and conversion rate optimization.

Lesson:Sometimes the true value of creating an online course is not the revenue you make from the course itself but from the long-term value of students who end up hiring you after you build a deep level of trust with them.

My other monthly recurring revenue client is someone who started out as a copywriting client. I was recruited to write website copy for him and he ended up hiring me as a Virtual CMO after this.

It’s worth noting that his website project was a disaster. He went through 3 web designers, which resulted in me spending twice as many hours on his project than I planned on. This means my “hourly rate” was essentially cut in half.

But I decided to just do a good job regardless and not complain.

Lesson: Going the extra mile matters. In this case it turned into a good recurring revenue client. I could have complained about the time I was spending on the initial project so I could “get more per hour” but I didn’t (believe me I came close!).

I also have what feels like a 4th recurring revenue client but I’m not counting him because even though he’s been placing monthly orders for copywriting work, he’s not technically on a monthly retainer.

So making 81% of my income from recurring revenue clients definitely feels good. I still want to get to 100% and I still want that 100% to be as a business owner and not as as a freelancer, but one step at a time!